Well, I complained so much during the movie that my wife finally told me to shut up. I hated it. It doesn't even pretend to be homage, it's just theft. Another thing they stole...that vast underground installation that turns out to be a buried spaceship is straight from Cowboys and Aliens. It's all flash and no substance. Pathetic.

Let's not forget the utter silliness of that girl running around and doing action hero stuff just five minutes after undergoing major abdominal surgery. Oh sure, the script called for her to grab her tummy and wince now and then, But she was no more convincing doing that than any of the other things she did. Ripley, she ain't.

Charlize Theron was totally wasted in this movie as the Burke character from Aliens. At least she can put in her resumé that she was once killed by a spaceship falling on her. Not many people can say that.

Ridley Scott directed the first Alien movie, and it's painfully obvious he was trying to recreate that success in Prometheus. He even used his Alien designer, H.R. Giger. I did like the look of the movie, but then I've long admired Giger's "biomechanic" work, even before Alien was released. But that was the only thing I liked in Prometheus, tempered slightly by the fact I'd seen much of it in the earlier movies.

I left the theater thinking of sending a nasty letter to Roger Ebert for writing a rave review of the movie. But then I had second thoughts: did he really write it? Could Ebert's health problems be causing him to farm out some reviews to other writers? In retrospect, the review didn't sound like Ebert -- not exactly naïve, but too easily accepting, somehow. Ebert would have spotted all those borrowed elements, wouldn't he? A couple of times in the review, a sentence appeared saying Prometheus was not Aliens...why? Denying the borrowings? The word "thought-provoking" was used -- whaaaat? Because the characters wondered where we came from? As if no one had ever thought that before?

Or maybe I'm just talking through my hat. Would someone else please read the review and tell me what you think?

Yeah, that review is questionable at least. Too gosh-gee-whiz. But truthfully I don't think I'd have noticed anything off-kilter if I read the review before seeing the movie. It sounds like a studio review. I don't know if they're still doing it, but studios used to send PR packages to newspapers that contained glowing reviews of their newest movies. Local reviewers were entitled to use any part of the review without quote marks, and small papers with no movie reviewer often ran the whole review. It's hard to think a Big Name like Ebert and a Big Newspaper like the Chicago Sun-Times would need to run a PR review, but I guess stranger things have happened.